by Anne Lamott
She realized with a start that she’d never actually seen him indoors. He was always outside; what need had he ever had to be inside? She squeezed her eyes closed to shut him out, but saw him anyway peering down from above, as if he’d really been there, watching her sleep. Now she suddenly wasn’t sure who it was, this phantom, this man who was in their house. Was it Luther, was it Andrew? She wanted the phantom to come back, wanted to see Andrew again, and she opened her eyes to the morning’s first light. And in that light she understood that she had been dreaming of Luther.
She could almost see him still, could pick up the dream where she’d left off; she felt him turn and walk away in his well-tended raggedness. Who was stitching up the tears in his clothes for him, who did his darning? She noticed his hands hanging at his sides as he moved away. They were dirty, as if he’d been digging, and he moved with an inexorable slowness that was somehow chilling, for it suggested that he could be moving quickly if he chose.
twelve
HALLIE called the next day, the morning after Rosie and Simone came home from San Mateo with runner-up trophies in doubles. They had lost in straight sets to Deb Hall and Sue Atterbury. They had beaten Deb and Sue twice so far and lost twice. They were tied now for the number one ranking. Rosie was furious; Simone had played the worst tennis of the year, now that she was fatter and sluggish in the heat. On top of this, she had been alternately weepy and mean. So Elizabeth watched Rosie take the phone call from Hallie, sullen, withholding, pigeon-toed, not saying much. Then she began to melt, laughing at something Hallie said, then looking up at Elizabeth and rolling her eyes to show she wasn’t really buying it. Elizabeth went to the kitchen to give her some privacy; after a while Rosie came in.
“Can I go over to Hallie’s today?”
“Yeah, I guess so. If that’s what you want to do. Do you need a lift?”
“No. I’ll ride my bike.”
Sometime later Elizabeth watched her pedal off, and then she went out to work in the garden, full of foreboding. That goddamn trampoline. Why, after all that Rosie had survived—nearly drowning in the river, all those hours spent on freeways getting to tournaments, all those hours with Luther’s eyes on her—did she need to risk breaking her neck at play?
Elizabeth got to her feet, wanting to rush to Hallie’s house, drag Rosie home with her, keep her safe. Boing, boing boing, she heard, the springs straining away from the horizontal frame with each bounce on the canvas. And she knew she was nuts, that this was compulsion and therefore about something else, but she didn’t know what. She went inside and looked up Hallie’s number.
“Hello, Marilyn,” she said when Hallie’s mother answered. “This is Elizabeth. Just checking in. How are the girls doing?”
“I can see them from here. It’s just Hallie and Rosie today. They’re having a ball. Rosie’s on the trampoline right now—whoa!”
“What?”
“She just did a back flip. All right!”
“How on earth did she know how to do a back flip?” This was how the little girl in Life magazine broke her neck thirty-five years ago.
“Well, she’s very athletic obviously, and Hallie must have taught her. Whoa!!”
“What!!”
“She just did another.”
“Marilyn? Has anyone ever gotten hurt on your trampoline?”
“Not badly.”
ELIZABETH, miserable on the couch, wondered if this was what it was going to be like when Rosie started driving. Would Elizabeth sit on the couch every night imagining her daughter dead? Maybe, she considered, she could practice living with the uncertainty. So she breathed quietly, listening. A loud motor: someone in the neighborhood was mowing the lawn; and after a minute Elizabeth’s chin was nodding up and down, as if off in the distance she heard, “Boing, boing boing.”
Elizabeth got her purse, fished out her keys, and went to the car. “This is crazy,” she said but turned on the ignition and put the car in gear. Ten minutes later she screeched up outside Hallie’s house and heard the springs and creaks of the trampoline as soon as she opened her car door. She went through the gate and followed the brick path around to the backyard, where her daughter was jumping five feet up in the air with each bounce, up against the cloudy blue sky, the lattice gate covered with ivy behind her. Elizabeth had not seen this much pure joy on Rosie’s face since she was a little girl swinging in the park, and she knew her child was safe here. She saw that all these years she could have been jumping with her, risking life and limb for those ecstatic moments. Pain washed over her out of the blue. And then Rosie flipped forward, too high, misjudging, landing on her feet two inches from the edge of the canvas and onto the springs. Hallie screamed, with laughter in her voice, but right away Rosie regained her balance: boing boing boing. And then Rosie saw Elizabeth, and her face grew dark and puzzled.
She slowed herself down, stopped, glanced at Hallie, and then walked to the edge of the trampoline.
“Hi, honey,” Elizabeth said tentatively.
“Why are you here, Mom?”
“Well. I don’t know exactly. I guess I’ve never seen this thing before, and I wanted to see what it was like.”
“You should get on it, Elizabeth.”
“Oh, no, Hallie, no.”
“Come on. My mom does it. It burns off three hundred calories an hour.”
“No, no.”
Rosie was looking at her with an expression that said clearly that she must not under any circumstances get on the trampoline. But Elizabeth suddenly knew that this was why she’d been called here.
“Rosie?” she asked, pleading.
Rosie looked away in annoyance and disbelief.
“You have to take your shoes off, Elizabeth,” Hallie was saying.
“Okay,” said Elizabeth, and putting her back against the frame and her arms on its sides, she pulled herself up onto the trampoline. Her arms trembled. Rosie walked to the edge to climb down.
“No—stay with me, honey. Jump with me.”
“Yeah, right.”
Elizabeth stared into her daughter’s face, willing her to look back, and finally she did, the small screwed-up face with the piercing blue eyes as bright as the few clear patches of sky, and that lovely skin, now flushed with red in the cheeks. “Come on, Rosie. Just jump with me.”
Rosie felt as humiliated as if her mother wanted to dance together at a tennis club dance in front of the other kids. But Hallie was coming over to actually take her mother’s shoes away, the horrible scuffed drug-addict loafers, and she saw no way out. Elizabeth stood unsteadily on the canvas, waiting.
“Well,” said Rosie finally. “What do you expect me to do? Pick you up and hold you while I jump? You just start jumping up and down, bouncing, okay?”
“Okay.”
Elizabeth began to bounce up and down, jerky and stiff, feeling and—she imagined—looking like Virginia Woolf, with one of her headaches, made to bounce on a trampoline. Rosie bounced beside her, up and down, up against the sky, down with the lattice behind her, and finally Elizabeth got some rhythm going, up and down, higher and higher beside her daughter, bouncing away. Rosie softened, even gently reached for her hands and held them while they jumped. Elizabeth stopped feeling quite so much like a wobbly newborn pony and bounced for a moment with real pleasure. Out of nowhere, though, she almost lost her balance, and then, regaining it, she almost fell over again. She looked up to discover Rosie leering at her evilly, and she realized with dismay that Rosie was taking an extra jump between each of hers, trying to trip her up, the way the teenagers probably did with each other. Elizabeth lost her balance, and fell on her side.
Anger and a deep sense of betrayal flushed through her, as she bounced about clumsily while Rosie kept jumping. “Stop it,” she cried, but now Rosie was laughing, and she started laughing too, although she was very mad. It was so hard to get up with Rosie bouncing, and she flopped around helplessly like a turtle on its back. Then she started laughing so hard she was afraid for a moment
that she might wet her pants. Rosie pulled her to her feet, but she couldn’t find her rhythm again because she kept laughing, even though now Rosie had stopped. And Elizabeth began to feel a shift in her chest, between this now hysterical laughter and a jagged tearing feeling.
Like the sun shining through the clouds, a memory began to show through the veil, distant and then nearer, of six-year-old Elizabeth riding on a seesaw with a boy of ten or so—a mean boy who tricked her, who sat down on the asphalt, lifting her up in the air and holding her there while she begged him to ease her down. She saw him smile with pleasure while she squirmed on her side of the board, high in the sky, afraid she would fall on her head and die, and then finally, finally, the boy bounced up, and she crashed down and hit her pubic bone so hard that her head rang like a gong.
Still she bounced with Rosie, feeling now like a trapdoor might open beneath her and swallow her up. The capsule in her throat filled to the bursting point, and she found herself crying hard. Still bouncing jerkily, she tried to cover her grimace with her hands. “Mom!” Rosie cried in distress and looked over to see what Hallie was doing. Hallie was gaping. Shaking and wracked with sobs, Elizabeth dropped to the canvas, pulled her knees to her chest, and hid her face deeper behind her hands.
Rosie did not know what to do. Hallie pointed to the house furtively, as if perhaps her mother could help. After she tiptoed away, Rosie stood watching her pale wraith of a mother rock back and forth, still crying.
“Mom?” said Rosie, and dropped to her knees, bouncing her mother further about by accident, reaching out to steady her.
“Mommy,” she whispered. “Mommy? What’s wrong?”
tide pools
one
OH, Elizabeth, Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth sat silently on the bed with her eyes closed. She had been sitting like this almost all day. She had spent most of the day before crying about nothing she could put her finger on. James was simply keeping her company. She thought about drinking and she thought about taking an overdose of prescription drugs, although she did not have any. Through her confusion and sadness, she was glad that James was someone who knew about the nihilistic forces out there and therefore forgave her for feeling so pummeled. She wondered if he was having second thoughts about the sickness-and-health part of their vow, the most difficult line of all, yet he did not leave her side.
“What are you thinking about, Elizabeth?”
“Nothing.” They sat with their backs resting on the headboard Andrew had brought back from Spain.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to find you a therapist?”
“Uh-huh.”
It had been five days since the episode on the trampoline, five days of bed rest and crying. Rae had been by every day; Lank had missed only the Friday when he and the other teachers in his school district had had an all-day meeting to prepare for classes, which would begin again soon. No one had been able to cheer her up, so it was agreed that they would all just keep her company until she felt better, until she snapped out of this thing. Lank and Rae had spent one afternoon lying on either side of her, like bookends, watching the TV that James had wheeled in, and watching her sleep. Even Simone was coming by to lie on the bed with her. There had been a strangely lovely hour the day before when Rae had been reading to Elizabeth on the bed, and Simone and Rosie had stopped by. Simone had made a card for Elizabeth, the kind little kids make by ironing crayon shavings between two pieces of waxed paper.
“It’s so pretty,” said Rae, “and you look so pretty, too. Do you have people to tell you that? That you look wonderful?”
“Well, I’m as fat as a pig,” said Simone. “I’ve already gained fifteen pounds. I’ve got this weird cellulite all down the back of my legs.”
“You’re lucky to have cellulite,” said Rae, making room for her on the bed. “Ten years ago I had cellulite. I’d kill to have it back. They don’t even have a name for what it turns into.”
SHE got Rae and James to drive her to meetings almost every day. She didn’t feel like driving; she felt too odd. She sat in the meetings and didn’t speak, and she left early, but going to them helped her in some low-grade grounding way. It also seemed to make James feel less anxious. She could feel James’s worry: that this thing was taking away someone whom he knew—someone so helpful and encouraging and funny, his great listener, his ally—and leaving in its place a millstone and a liability, someone incapable of dishing out joy. James was having to do the work of both partners in this household, and daily life battered at him—dishes and clothes piled up.
He and Rosie grew very quiet, very watchful. Elizabeth had the sense that they were both biting back words they wished they could yell: Get up and fly right! You’ve always been able to haul yourself up before, goddamn it! You created this; you uncreate it. Instead, they came in and took turns lying beside her, bringing her soup and tea.
ON the seventh day of whatever was going on, she remembered a moment seven years ago, sitting on this very bed with Rosie in her lap, holding a wad of Kleenex to a cut below Rosie’s eye where she’d run into a branch and nearly put her eye out. “Why did God make us so soft that we bleed?” she’d asked, and Elizabeth had not had a good answer then, nor would she now.
She and James now sat on this bed, on her first husband’s bed, inherited from his parents.
“Life is too sad for me, James.”
They had made love in this room so many times over the last five years, a thousand times on this bed, and before James, a thousand times with Andrew. Rosie had lain here as a somber infant, nursing or asleep, considering this or that: her mother’s face, her father’s hands, long and broad like a doctor’s.
Elizabeth thought about her garden, which in mid August was at the height of fecundity, flourishing heartlessly while she was withering up. The good part would be squashing pests, getting to hate and kill something and get away with it. But no one in her family was eating anymore. She’d never had much of an appetite, James was on some sort of a diet now, and Rosie, so rarely home, picked at her food moodily, wanting to be upstairs in her room, listening to her rap music, talking on the phone. All the food Elizabeth’s lovely garden produced, all the beautiful basic food she had worked so hard to grow, went bad in the produce drawer of the refrigerator. She was mocked by bounty.
“Shall I take you to a meeting?”
“No, thank you,” she said. Actually, she didn’t know if she was well enough to leave the house and hang out with all those prickly, self-obsessed people. She thought about calling the woman whom she’d asked to sponsor her years ago, whom she almost never called anymore, but she did not want to have to put up with one of her inspiring little talks. “I’ll go tomorrow.”
“Do you want me to call Rae and see if she’s around?”
“I do,” said Elizabeth. “That’s what I want.” And Rae was home and said she’d be right over. Just like that, she said she’d be right over.
Rae arrived in the bedroom sometime later and lay down at the foot of the bed. She took Elizabeth’s feet in her hands, as she had with Charles, and rubbed them as if they were frostbitten and she were rubbing life and circulation back into them.
“Are you okay, honey bear? Do you want to go outside? Do you want to go to Samuel P. Taylor Park?”
“Okay. I think that would be okay.”
AN hour later they were sitting on an isolated stretch of ground along the bank of the river; their backs were up against the stump of a fallen redwood. As Elizabeth listened to the wet heartbeat of the river, the small woman inside her felt like she was nursing at Rae’s breast. The light trickling through the branches and leaves sparkled with flakes of pollen and seedpods and dust, and the two women sat with their shoulders touching, silent. Being here was like being inside a fold in civilization: people up above, in the parking lot and at the campsites, had brought their whole houses along, but down here by the river, no one had brought anything, so this moment was about nothing but the stream. It was about how tem
porary they were. Elizabeth breathed slowly and deeply, aware of the huge construct of grief she had entered into, the twilight she had entered, abandoned her family to, and wondered what tiny tendrils might draw her back into life.
two
ROSIE watched her mother need to be alone. For the first time in four years, Elizabeth’s focus was not on Rosie and James and Rae. James was doing his best to keep the house running, to get Rosie to her practices, but he did this by having Rae and Lank drive her around so he could still find time for his book and his radio gig.
She felt like a ghost. She felt scared of school starting, of everyone finding out that Simone was pregnant. All the kids would shun them, her and Simone; they’d give Simone a very wide berth, like you would around a jellyfish. They would both end up being outcasts, but at least Simone would also end up with a baby. Rosie would be truly alone.
She tried to take care of her mother as well as she could and had almost decided to default in Menlo Park so she could stay home, even though it was the last tournament of the summer. But then out of the blue, Peter had called. He was back! He couldn’t wait to see her, to hear about all the matches he had missed, and hoped he would see her later that day in Menlo Park. And so she guiltily said good-bye to her mother and left with Veronica.
She decided to put on a little mascara, the dark blue Revlon she and Hallie had bought in San Francisco earlier in the summer. She wore better clothes than she had been wearing lately, a real tennis dress instead of massive shorts and T-shirts. She felt like she was going to see her boyfriend, but at the club where the tournament was being held, she couldn’t find him anywhere; no one had seen him. She simply couldn’t believe it—he’d said he was going to be there—and she wandered around the club dazed with disappointment, not hearing the rallies, the chatter, swerving at the last minute to avoid walking into people’s backs like an animal with a disease that made it stagger.